The status of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks remained unclear through much of Thursday, amid the publication of conflicting reports describing not just ongoing meetings but also regarding proposals to extend negotiations beyond the original April 29 deadline of a U.S.-backed peace push. Substantive final status negotiations have been offline since last...

Reuters on Thursday conveyed details of a conversation between Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in which Lew expressed concern over a Russian-Iranian oil-for-goods deal: “Secretary Lew reiterated our serious concerns regarding reports of a possible deal between Russia and Iran involving oil-for-goods,” a Treasury representative said in a...

The New York Times reported this week that Iran and the global P5+1 powers had concluded two days of talks but are still far from a final agreement: The lead negotiators, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, and Catherine Ashton, the top foreign policy official of the European Union, made the...

Al Arabiya on Wednesday conveyed statements from Kuwait’s foreign minister suggesting that the bulk of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was close to healing a rift with GCC member Qatar, which had been deepening in recent months and even years as Qatar allied itself with actors that the Gulf countries...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday instructed high-level government officials to limit cooperation with Palestinian counterparts to security concerns and peace negotiations, a move that an Israeli government official told Reuters was in response to “the Palestinians’ grave violation of their commitments in the framework of the peace talks”: Israeli government...

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday ruled out concessions on what he described as Iran’s “nuclear achievements,” the latest in a line of repeated and explicit statements from top Iranian officials ruling out moves that Western analysts and the Obama administration consider minimal conditions necessary to verifiably put the Islamic...